The Toys of Peace, and other papers eBook

the most part with chess and draughts-boards, and
wooden boxes of chessmen and dominoes. Listlessly
she picked up one of the papers, the Sentinel,
and glanced at its contents. Suddenly she started,
and began to read with breathless attention a prominently
printed article, headed “A Little Limelight
on Sir John Chobham.” The colour ebbed
away from her face, a look of frightened despair crept
into her eyes. Never, in any novel that she
had read, had a defenceless young woman been confronted
with a situation like this. Sir John, the Hugo
of her imagination, was, if anything, rather more
depraved and despicable than Robert Bludward.
He was mean, evasive, callously indifferent to his
country’s interests, a cheat, a man who habitually
broke his word, and who was responsible, with his
associates, for most of the poverty, misery, crime,
and national degradation with which the country was
afflicted. He was also a candidate for Parliament,
it seemed, and as there was only one seat in this
particular locality, it was obvious that the success
of either Robert or Sir John would mean a check to
the ambitions of the other, hence, no doubt, the rivalry
and enmity between these otherwise kindred souls.
One was seeking to have his enemy done to death, the
other was apparently trying to stir up his supporters
to an act of “Lynch law”. All this
in order that there might be an unopposed election,
that one or other of the candidates might go into
Parliament with honeyed eloquence on his lips and
blood on his heart. Were men really so vile?

“I must go back to Webblehinton at once,”
Alethia informed her astonished hostess at lunch time;
“I have had a telegram. A friend is very
seriously ill and I have been sent for.”

It was dreadful to have to concoct lies, but it would
be more dreadful to have to spend another night under
that roof.

Alethia reads novels now with even greater appreciation
than before. She has been herself in the world
outside Webblehinton, the world where the great dramas
of sin and villainy are played unceasingly. She
had come unscathed through it, but what might have
happened if she had gone unsuspectingly to visit Sir
John Chobham and warn him of his danger? What
indeed! She had been saved by the fearless outspokenness
of the local Press.

THE INTERLOPERS

In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern
spurs of the Karpathians, a man stood one winter night
watching and listening, as though he waited for some
beast of the woods to come within the range of his
vision, and, later, of his rifle. But the game
for whose presence he kept so keen an outlook was
none that figured in the sportsman’s calendar
as lawful and proper for the chase; Ulrich von Gradwitz
patrolled the dark forest in quest of a human enemy.